“This future is possible”

 Interview by Julia Stanton 

Mr Myres, when did the idea for this game first come to you?

In 2017, I was in London with my family. I went to a meet-up for game designers while my parents went to the British Museum. Afterwards, my mother was beside herself with anger. She had seen an ancient tomb there that had been transported stone by stone from southern Turkey to the British Museum. She was stunned by the sheer audacity of it and said, rather offhandedly: “You should make a game about that.”

Experts estimate that between 80 and 90 per cent of Africa’s cultural artefacts are held in European museums. Only a fraction of these collections has ever been put on display. Why did you want to approach such a serious subject in a playful way?

Stories about Black people often involve suffering. Although the subject is serious, we wanted to treat it with a sense of joy and humour. At the end of the game, you take the recovered artefacts home. That gives players a sense of what that future might feel like.

“Relooted” is set at the end of the 21st century and the terms of a transatlantic restitution treaty promising the return of African artefacts from museums have changed. In this context, you speak of African futurism. What does that mean?

African futurism, on which the game is based, is slightly different from Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism tends to be more sci-fi like or fantastical. African futurism, by contrast, places our continent at the centre of events, focusing on real places, real cultures and real people projected into the future. Africa does not often imagine the future. How could it, when its past has been taken away and put thousands of miles away in a museum it may never have access to? That fact makes it so powerful to imagine what real African cities might look like in a utopian future. Almost subconsciously, the game sparks the idea that such a future is possible. 

“Almost every aspect of the project was about making a game about Africans in Africa as authentic as possible”

What mattered most to you during the development of the game?

“Relooted” is the largest single video game project ever realised in sub-Saharan Africa. We were all very aware of the responsibility that came with that. It was important to us to execute the concept to the highest possible standard. Above all, authenticity was key. We worked with African voice actors, for instance, and made sure the development team itself was African. In almost every aspect of the project, the aim was to create a game about Africans in Africa that felt as authentic as possible.

How long did development take?

We began working on the first version at the end of 2018 and pitched a prototype in early 2019. It took a long time to secure funding and assemble the team. At its peak, around 50 people were working on the project full-time simultaneously. In total, roughly 100 to 135 people were involved, the majority from sub-Saharan Africa.

The game has been available on PC and Xbox since mid-February. What can I expect as a player?

You control the main character, Nomali, who practises parkour but is also the mastermind behind the heist crew. You guide her while she directs the others to where they need to be for the plan to work. We developed an experimental game loop that allows players to move through the target building, identify problems and position solutions in advance. The moment you take one of the artefacts, you have thirty seconds before security arrives. You then execute the plan you created yourself — and it feels as seamless as being inside your own heist plot.

The issue of stolen African artefacts is pan-African, so the heist crew is too. They are not criminals; they all have ordinary jobs and no financial motive. They are simply bringing the artefacts home. There’s a bodybuilder from Malawi, an acrobat from Cameroon, the tech specialist from the Congo and several South Africans. We drew on classic heist tropes and then decided where each character might come from. It was important for us to say: this character belongs to a specific ethnic group — what might that look like in the future?

“Africa is often portrayed as homogeneous. So we playfully mirrored that back to the West”

All the artefacts in the game exist in real life, but the museums do not. Why is that?

The game is about the artefacts, not the museums. Why spend time recreating the British Museum when we could invest that time in a futuristic Johannesburg or in the artefacts themselves? That was a political choice. Also, Africa is often portrayed as homogeneous in the West , so we playfully mirrored that. Europe is simply “the Old World,” generically European. The USA is “the Shiny Place,” a mix of Las Vegas and Times Square — absurd and generic.

There are seventy artefacts in the game. How were they chosen?

As it’s a pan-African theme, we picked artefacts from across the continent, from almost 25 countries. We wanted objects of deep cultural or spiritual significance, not small curiosities. We’re not trying to convince anyone they should be returned; we present the information and let players decide for themselves. As for the reconstructions, one or two people worked full-time for about a year, modelling them by hand based on photos — and sometimes very few photos.

“Producing the game made me aware of my own blind spots”

Does the game have a strong educational aspect?

There’s a lot of information in the game, but most of it is optional. If someone isn’t interested, they can skip it. We wanted the game to be fun. We see it as an invitation. People have told us that after playing, they googled artefacts and did extensive Wikipedia research. Relooted isn’t a textbook — it’s meant to spark curiosity.

What do you hope the game will achieve?

If we could help return even a single artefact home, that would of course be amazing, though that wasn’t our main goal. Above all, I hope people develop an interest in African culture and history. Producing the game made me aware of my own blind spots, even as someone who loves history. For example, there’s the golden rhinoceros of Mapungubwe, discovered during apartheid in South Africa. The government suppressed knowledge of it because they didn’t want people to learn that advanced metallurgy existed in Africa long before Europeans arrived. We know about ancient Greece and Persia, but there’s so much incredible history in Africa that many people have never heard of.